A More Critical Approach to Our Toilets and Technologies

As with most mainstream technologies, pop culture in the West no doubt views the toilet as a useful invention. Effective in its disposal of human waste, the greatest stink created by this set-diameter bowl is the occasional need for a good scrub or available plumber.

As with most mainstream technologies, pop culture in the West no doubt views the toilet as a useful invention. Effective in its disposal of human waste, the greatest stink created by this set-diameter bowl is the occasional need for a good scrub or available plumber.

But if we look a little deeper, the toilet proves a prime example for dispelling the dangerous mainstream assumption: that technology is inherently beneficial or, at worst, value-neutral.

As with all technologies, the toilet embodies and carries the biases of the contexts in which it was created. Such bias can extend to matters of history, geography, environment, health, gender, religion and culture.

The toilet’s creators, for example, considered the sitting position culturally superior and more dignified than the ‘primitive’ squatting position. The components of your toilet probably were built by exploited workforces in unhealthy conditions, in multiple workplaces many thousands of miles away. The energy used in your toilet’s production, distribution, and installation resulted in significant greenhouse gas emissions into the earth’s atmosphere.

In its ‘seated’ as opposed to ‘squat’ form, we increase our risk of constipation, bowel disease, and colon cancer and alienate women from a natural posture relevant to birthing. With each flush, prodigious amounts of useful phosphorous in our urine is wasted away. Forests have been cleared for the paper we use when going to the loo. And most toilets can be seen as reinforcing the ideologically-laden notion of ‘white’ as purity.

Yet, despite these subtle, inbuilt biases, the Enlightenment-driven belief in the ideological neutrality of science and its subsequent physical-form manifestations would appear to grow, daily, compounded by our increasing distance from the creation of the technologies we use. Through corporate and government spin, this physical distance is then married with ‘objective’ distance; we are tricked into thinking that technologies can only have negative impacts if they are misused or misappropriated — always by others.

Questioning carbon emissions tied to usage remains the only semblance of a value-based critique. This void feeds ubiquitous user-passivity, undermining attempts to redress broader power inequities because few of us recognise and accept that we can be both fighting for change, yet simultaneously preserving gross inequities through our submission to technocracy.

A more critical approach to technologies means the opportunity to explore and rectify societal bias in its many forms. It is time we take a good, hard look at technologies like our toilet and ask, “What really lies beneath?”

Donnie Maclurcan is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Institute for Nanoscale Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is a passionate advocate for paths to global prosperity that do not rely on economic growth.

Andre Radan holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Sydney, where he majored in History. Of particular interest to Andre throughout his life has been the relationship between humankind and our environment. To understand how this relationship impacts and controls the way society has developed and is developing is the driving force through almost all his research.

The text of this post is shared here under our usual CC-by-sa license, with permission of the authors.

5 thoughts on “A More Critical Approach to Our Toilets and Technologies”

We used to have a Rotaloo until council regulations forced its removal and replacement with a mainstream toilet. Planning to build removable support for squatting when possible to make the best of an undesirable situation.

What was the specific regulation(s) that they used against the Rotaloo? The council just required flush rather than composting toilets? (Which would be a classic case of “here’s a blanket rule that satisfies immediate health concerns while ignoring the wider context of nutrient flow, energy use and water quality”)

In talking with the council, I discovered that our owner could have applied for an exemption from the ‘Brooklyn and Danger Island connection policy’ regulations, but that particular specifications would have needed to be met (e.g. complicity with NSW Health Department regulations, burying of waste under at least 300mm of soil, etc.) and that the council would have encouraged the owners to connect to the mains anyway. That said, apparently someone in our town did apply and managed to keep their composting toilet!